THE 900 NUMBER AS AUDIENCE POLLSTER

By LISA BELKIN

Published: July 6, 1987

Television is using the telephone as an instrument of audience opinion, asking for votes on everything from whether Bernhard Goetz is guilty, to who will win the Super Bowl, to whether a particular television pilot would succeed or fail, but opinion among television executives is divided. The ballots are cast by calling numbers with a 900 prefix; the opinion calls are counted rather than answered. To vote for the Denver Broncos, viewers dial one number. To vote for the New Jersey Giants, they dial another. There is a charge to the caller, usually of 50 cents, a percentage of which is given to the station, which pays nothing for the service.

Another form of 900 service is called an ''information line,'' on which callers pay the same 50 cents a call to listen to a tape. Most of the 46,000 lines reserved for information lines (the number will increase to 80,000 this month) are used for sports highlights, financial news, weather reports and other things.

As the use of these numbers grows, so do the protests from pollsters -many of whom work within the television industry - who describe the results of the call-ins as misleading. ''This is not a scientific poll but it is presented as a scientific poll,'' said the director of the election and survey unit for CBS, Warren Mitofsky. ''They always put their disclaimers on, but then they go on and talk about the results as if they were talking about public opinion.'' Rating Past Pilots

But audiences seem to find the numbers intriguing, and stations continue to use them, mostly in regard to entertainment shows. CBS, for instance, is currently presenting a series called ''Summer Playhouse'' every Friday night. Each of the shows is a pilot for a series the network decided not to run, and the audience is asked to vote on whether they enjoyed the pilot.

NBC used the numbers for ''The Most Beautiful Girl in the World'' pageant two years ago and said that one million calls were received. Last April, ABC asked viewers to vote for their favorite songs of the decade during a Dick Clark music special, and received 1.3 million calls.

Many of the applications of the 900 numbers, however, are to gauge audience reaction to news events. Several dozen radio stations have leased the lines full time for that purpose, according to A.T.&T.'s product manager for 900 service, Andrea West. Just before a verdict was returned in the Goetz trial, the Fox Broadcasting Company's ''Current Affair'' program asked its viewers to vote on his guilt or innocence. (They found him not guilty.) Reacting to Success The lines are so popular that A.T.&T. increased the number late last year, to 128,000 from 80,000. And, according to Ms. West, the phone company has developed additional services with television stations in mind and is actively promoting them.

ABC introduced Soap Talk in January, a 900 number that is answered by the taped voice of an ABC soap-opera star. The network said the line -which is out of service until the fall -received five million calls in the first 11 weeks. Also being pitched to television stations is a concept called ''premium numbers,'' which A.T.&T. is promoting as the future of charity telethons. With this system, a number would be flashed on the screen as a low-overhead way to attract small donations; each call would cost up to $2.50 and would be billed directly to the charity, with a percentage taken for the telephone company and the host station.

All these uses of the telephone earn profits for television stations. A CBS spokesman, George Schweitzer, is careful to stress that the funds raised from 900 numbers are donated to charity.

More controversial is the question of whether the noninformational numbers should be used for seeking audience opinion. First Used in 1980

''It looks like a poll, it sounds like a poll, but it isn't a poll,'' said Richard Kaplan, executive producer of ''Nightline.'' It was that program that first used the 900 numbers, to gauge audience reaction to the Presidential debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980. The show stopped using the lines in 1983, before Mr. Kaplan joined the staff, and he vows they will not be used again.

The results of such tallies, according to Mr. Kaplan, are skewed because the people who respond are not randomly selected, but choose to make the call. In addition, all phones handle the same number of calls per minute, which gives all callers from a sparsely populated state the chance to get through, whereas callers from a state such as New York are more likely to hear a busy signal.

''I think there are certain circumstances when I can see using a 900 number,'' Mr. Kaplan said. ''It's great entertainment. When you're voting on football, I think you can have some fun with that. But I don't think you should use a 900 number to decide if we should go to war with Iran and I don't think we should use a 900 number to decide who won a presidential debate.''

For every broadcaster who criticizes the system, however, there is another who praises - and uses - it. ''A Current Affair'' has conducted about one telephone canvass a month in the past year, according to the show's producer, Joachim Blunck, and receives between 10,000 and 40,000 calls each time.

''As far as we're concerned, we're soliciting the opinion of our own viewers,'' Mr. Blunck said. ''We're not saying that this is what all the people in the country or all the people in New York think. We're saying this is what the people watching the show think.''

The 900 numbers, he said ''promote viewer involvement in the program.'' ''For us,'' he said, ''that's good.''